Ted Williams

Ted Williams: The Last Man to Hit .400

On 28 September 1941, Ted Williams was batting .39955 — a number that rounds up, and would have entered the record book as .400. Manager Joe Cronin offered to sit him down for the closing doubleheader in Philadelphia. Williams refused, in a sentence that explains most of his life: "If I'm going to be a .400 hitter, I want more than my toenails on the line." He went 6-for-8 and finished at .406. Nobody has done it since.

San Diego and the Brown Cow

Theodore Samuel Williams was born on 30 August 1918 in San Diego, named for Theodore Roosevelt and for his father Samuel, a soldier, sheriff and photographer. His mother, May Venzor, was a Mexican-American from El Paso who worked as a Salvation Army evangelist. Williams understood what his surname had spared him: "If I had my mother's name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days."

He learned to throw from his uncle Saul Venzor and starred as a pitcher at Herbert Hoover High School. The Cardinals and Yankees came calling; his mother kept him close to home, so he signed with the Pacific Coast League's San Diego Padres in 1936. Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins gave the verdict that stuck: "It wasn't hard to find Ted Williams. He stood out like a brown cow in a field of white cows." Sent to Minneapolis in 1938, he took hitting advice from Rogers Hornsby and won the American Association Triple Crown at .366 with 46 home runs.

The Kid Arrives

He debuted against the Yankees on 20 April 1939. Equipment manager Johnny Orlando called him "the Kid," and the name outlived everyone who used it first. His rookie line — .327, 31 home runs, 145 RBIs — made him the first rookie to lead the league in runs batted in. Babe Ruth pronounced him Rookie of the Year.

The 1941 season began with a broken ankle in spring training and ended as one of the great offensive campaigns in history: .406, 37 home runs, 120 RBIs. His .553 on-base percentage stood as a record until Barry Bonds passed it in 2002; his 1.287 OPS was the highest posted in the majors between 1923 and 2001. He won that year's All-Star Game with a ninth-inning home run, a swing he said he took with his eyes closed and which "remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life."

He did not win the MVP: Joe DiMaggio's 56-game streak took it, 291 votes to 254. In 1947, having just won the Triple Crown, Williams lost again to DiMaggio by a single point after one writer left him off a ten-man ballot entirely.

Five Years in Uniform

Williams joined the Navy Reserve in May 1942, was commissioned a Marine Corps aviator in 1944, trained on the F4U Corsair and spent the war instructing at NAS Pensacola. Then, at thirty-three, he was recalled for Korea in January 1952. After refresher training on the F9F Panther jet he joined VMF-311 at Pohang. On 16 February 1953, flying wingman to a future astronaut named John Glenn on a 35-plane raid near Pyongyang, Williams took anti-aircraft fire that wrecked his hydraulics and electrics; he put the jet down on its belly at K-13. He flew 39 combat missions and won the Air Medal with two Gold Stars. Glenn called him one of the best pilots he knew. Service cost Williams roughly five seasons — almost certainly 600 career home runs, possibly a run at Ruth's 714.

The Science of Hitting

What separated Williams from other sluggers was method. He used a lighter bat than his contemporaries in order to swing it faster, divided the strike zone into a grid, and swung only at pitches in the cells where he could do damage — a discipline that produced 2,021 walks and a walks-to-plate-appearances ratio of .2065, the highest of any Hall of Famer. He wrote it all down in *The Science of Hitting* in 1970, and professional hitters still read it.

The ledger: 2,292 games, all with Boston, a .344 average, 521 home runs, 1,839 RBIs, and a .482 on-base percentage still the highest in the sport's history. Six batting titles, two Triple Crowns (1942, 1947), two MVPs (1946, 1949), nineteen All-Star selections. In 1949 he missed a third Triple Crown by .00016 and reached base in 84 consecutive games.

Knights of the Keyboard

He was also at war with Boston, calling the local press "the knights of the keyboard" and never forgiving a 1948 magazine feature that quoted his mother. Booed for two errors in 1950, he bowed mockingly to the crowd and spat toward the seats. In August 1956, after dropping a Mickey Mantle fly ball, he spat at a heckler and was fined $5,000 — then hit the go-ahead home run the next night to a standing ovation. "From '56 on," he said, "I realized that people were for me." He still refused to tip his cap, and would not do so until Ted Williams Day in 1991.

That included 28 September 1960, when he homered in his final at-bat and circled the bases without acknowledging anyone. John Updike wrote it up for *The New Yorker* as "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," producing the line that fixed Williams in American letters: "Gods do not answer letters."

Why Ted Is Called a Genius

Williams's case is not intellectual in the conventional sense, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It rests on craft — but the craft has a specific and unusually cerebral content, and that is what people mean by the word. He was among the first hitters to treat the act as an analysable system rather than an inborn gift. The strike-zone grid, the lighter bat chosen to buy bat speed, the refusal to swing outside his damage zones, the habit of taking the first pitch to gather information: this is a hitter running a model, and the walk totals are that model's signature. He could also articulate it, which almost none of his peers could. *The Science of Hitting* survives because it is genuine analysis rather than reminiscence.

The counter-case is substantial. Much of the legend rests on freakish eyesight and reflexes — physical endowments, not insight. His managerial career, the real test of whether the system could be transmitted, was ordinary after one strong first year; he admitted impatience with lesser players and to never having respected pitchers. Historians place him with Ruth and Bonds among the most productive hitters ever, but that is a claim about output. The genius claim is narrower, and better: he worked out *why* it worked.

Legacy

Elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1966, Williams used his induction speech to argue for men who were not there: "I hope some day the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given a chance." Paige was inducted in 1971, Gibson in 1972. He managed the Washington Senators to 86–76 in 1969, their only winning season in the city, and quietly funded the Jimmy Fund at Dana-Farber for decades, often paying children's medical bills himself.

George H. W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He died of cardiac arrest in Florida on 5 July 2002, aged eighty-three, and was followed into a strange afterlife: his children, against a will specifying cremation, sent his body to the Alcor cryonics facility on the strength of a family pact signed on a napkin. Boston named a harbour tunnel after him; the Red Sox retired number 9. He got the epitaph he asked for: "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived."

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Associated Press Athlete of the Year
• National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
• Air Medal
• Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Award
• Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame